K: and once again, missing the point…they aren’t “life haters”… on the contraire…
they want what people seem to want ( I don’t, but hay, I’m weird) People
want eternal life… see religions which promise eternal life at the side of god
or in the bowels of hell and one none religious method of achieving the goal
of eternal life is via technology…they don’t hate life if they want to prolong
life forever…I had to look up this Tim Cannon… and he has tech that is not
really any different then a tatoo and that is really the point here…
we are just at the begining of this use of technology and we don’t know
where exactly it is going to go…to panic or to have the fear that
Wendy and Karpel have about this is rather premature…and as the
article in Wiki said at this point, the type of placement of this sort
of technology is against the law and medical types won’t engage in this
type of body enhancement in the U.S for fear of losing their license…
so I won’t engage in the fear mongering that that wendy and karpel seem
to enjoy…
Tim doesn’t wish to have any part of his body remain human, Peter, he stated that in his quote. It’s not the technology that is the problem, it’s the dumb fucking people who can’t understand the difference between being a robot and being a human being, the morons who don’t see that kind of radical transformation as a problem for human survival. You don’t see the psychosis in becoming a robot as a problem do you Peter?
Is there already an official movement against transhumanism? I just Googled anti transhumanism and anti transhumanist groups and only three articles against transhumanism popped up in eleven pages of one search. Two of the three were discussing a recent release of The Anti-Transhumanist Manifesto http://privacysurgeon.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Human-manifesto_26_short-1.pdf
Thanks for the link! I think the counter-movement is more piecemeal. Like negative reactions to specific transhumanisms - gene modification, implants, whatever. Even the word transhumanism is not known by most people so it is hard to be in the counter movement. And of course there are gray areas where a technology is actually helping a problem - fixing hairlips is one thing, turning women into these hard-faced dolls another. I use plastic surgery as an example since it is now normal. It need not be transhumanism, but there are aspect of it that are first stages. Just as the modern, completely accepted, addiction to cellphone use is an early stage of transhumanism. One can have a cellphone and not be addicted. But many people - it is like smoking was in the 40s-60s - are radically addicted, but since it is a norm, they do not even realize it. And they are, to some degree dehumanized, like any full time addiction will do.
Anyway I am not sure how to raise awareness that there is an underlying pattern that could be called transhumanism, give people a sense of the common threads, so they recognize the coming variety of forms of it.
when you use botox in the face you reduce facial mobility. Reduced facial mobility reduces one’s ability to know one’s own emotions. Many of the current plastic surgery interventions for aesthetic reasons reduce facial mobility. They make the person, who is a specific kind of social mammal, less human, since they are less keyed in to social mammalian skills and interactions. it’s a small difference. Above you have a person who doesn’t give a shit if he is transformed into a Mars Rover. Must we really connect the dots for you? There is a part of technocrat society as mediated by corporations and the governments they control, that does not give a shit about the side effects and losses of humanity. The way Amazon treats its workers, for example, effectivizing all their movements to the point that they are like robots. The corporations do not care about how their products reduce the humanity of people and will market their products, interventions, based on their improvements, what they improve. They will control the way research is presented to the public. They will downplay and marginilize criticisms, which will be easier to push away. We can see the flatter less wrinkled face of the botoxed person, but the subtle losses of emotional self’awareness are harder to track, harder to quantify and more complicated to explain to the audience. People, unfortunately, play into this since they are trained to and really in some ways choose to be creatures who are guided by marketing. They like toys that make them feel powerful - look at the car marketing industry or the weapon industry. Transhumanism is basically as if Monsanto gets to fully focus on all facets of humans. Monsanto manages to play their role as a corporation feeding the poor, developing new beneficial technologies, increasing our ability to harvest from nature. If you look at what actually happens, say in Argentina, when Monsanto’s products become widespread, we do not find people being economically helped and we find food products that create health probems, damaged land and workers. Nevertheless Monsanto has the power to marginalize critique and control its own oversight through lobbying and revolving door employment in exchange with government. It will be forces like them that will market Transhumanism. A general problem however is even more important. Most academic people tend to think that if you cannot easily track an effect, it does not exist. They do not word it this way, but that is how they function in the world. This cripples them when they look at something like Transhumanism. They rarely ever consider the kinds of side effects I mentioned in regard to Botox. Why? Because they identify with the professional technocrats who came up with these processes and products. They are expert lovers, and identify with technocrats as something different from the religious experts. So if the technocrats present themselves as coming from science and rationality and package their products in those terms, academics are often completely unable to react negatively precisely because they, unconsciously, do not want to be seen as anything like religious people or people they deem irrational. And they will not see the anti’life outlook and hatred of humanity that the transhuman project is based on. They may notice it when it is presented by some stiff hero in a right wing tinged action film starring Bruce Willis or whoever the version is nowadays. Suddenly they notice the cardboard ideas of what a person is. But only when it comes with a right wing flag on it. When cardboard versions of what humans are come from the technocrats they are completely crippled to even notice it, because academics are trained to see technology as neutral and specifically not Abrahamist, and like most people, educated or not, left or right, they love a short cut. And the marketers know that people love short cuts and won’t look too carefully at all that is being bypassed. Look at how few educated people can see the incredible nuttiness of psychiatry and the psychopharmacological approachs to making us feel good or less bad. They may note the occasional excess, but they cannot see the breadth and depth of the problem there. The short cuts are cool, the academics cannot really look at technocrats speaking science babble - even when a few hard scientists, whose voices get marginalized, can - and we reduce our humanity through those wildly overprescribed pills. Transhumanism is not on the way, it is here. I can already hear the educated american saying, Oh, so you want to take pills away from Schizophrenics, just showing how little they understand about what is going on.
I pass them on the sidewalk, head down facing their cellphones, even if they are walking with the love of their life, texting or surfing, cannot put that damn thing down – access to all that wonderful information, the technocrats promise us – he lips puffy and stiff from the operation, in her blood anti-anxiety psychotropics taking the edge off and helping her stifle her limbic system, since it is so heavily pathologized - though often even education, or perhaps especially educated people, do not notice this pathologization because it comes from supposedly scientific people. She’s an addict with a dampened emotional life. She’s an early stage transhuman. And sure, the dreams of the transhumans sound more profound, but just as many, even educated people, do not have the tools to see what is already happening, the people bringing in Transhumanism also lack the tools, have already got a strangehold on their own limbic systems, have a detailing-their-car view of human development and are often on the Aspberger’s end of the spectrum so have less able to focus on social mammal skills and being-in-the-world side effects of their final solution.
So while the average post-humans will be carboard figures, the rich, getting better versions, will be hyped up, powerful creatures with limited limbic system processes, if any, and those who have opted out will have to deal with them. Think the superrich in some Latin American country now and how they relate to the poor, notched up a couple orders of magnitude in power difference via the wonders of technology. Sociopath subdeities.
As a lefty you no doubt have concerns about the gap between the rich and the poor - transhumanism will make today’s gap look like nitpicking. And this is not a concession that the rich will simply have the advantages of tranhuman tech, they will have the disadvantages, but will be lacking the human organic structures to even feel this. A taste of the problem can be found in the marginalized evidence that social media/smartphone use is reducing empathy, especially in children (by damaging their training in reading faces and tone of voice (mirror neuron etc.), and in fact isolating people. Facebook execs have actually come out and admitted 1) they used the most advanced neuroscience and cognitive psychology to design facebook to be addictive. These same people will design the coming transhuman technologies and while it is all peachy that some have regretted what they did, it is too late for this regret to affect their millions and the affects of their choices.
You seemed surprised that two social mammals - Wendy and I - see people who no longer want to be this, trying to develop widespread technology to do this, who will be in positions to sell this, in our current world where the limbic system is pathologized already, as reacting oddly, irrationally. When much of what we hold dear, as social mammals, is going to be weeded out in the software and hardware of transhumanism, just as it is being weeded out now, less effectively through many things including the examples I mentioned above. We are not reacting oddly. We notice the disinterest at best and hatred at worst of the limbic system, emotions, and other ‘obstacles’ to true efficiency and power, inherent in Transhumanism, and we notice the ways in which this hatred is already present. If I thought a few rich people would uppgrade themselves away from being human, I could give a shit. But like nanotech, gene tech and AI, transhumanism is a threat to the continued existence of social mammals on the planet.